How are your blogs doing? From the sound of this post, it seems like they're doing fine at the Centre Daily Times. You should check out the remarkable activity there, and at powerful, creative blogs being written and hosted throughout the company.
Share links to some of your success stories in the comments below, and we can all have a look.
–Howard Weaver
One suggestion re CentreDaily.com - it looks as though there's no [complete] "blog aggregation" page - at least not one with the editor's post in it, that I could see.
ReplyDelete(did notice there were very few comments on his posts, and this could be part of the reason)
The truth about online community building at newspapers, from Invisible Inkling's Ryan Sholin.
One suggestion from experience - make your 'contract' with the community explicit, to prevent misunderstandings.
(Example: whether you reserve the right to mass-delete past community-generated content without advance notice)
A blog such as this that focuses on a popular local team (college or otherwise) is a great way to build community and traffic.
ReplyDeleteAt the Tri-City Herald, we've taken multiple approaches to blogging and community publishing/forums.
We have four sports-related blogs/online columns. We have one political blog and three lifestyle blogs. The sports, political and one of the lifestyle blogs are more like columns than actual blogs because we do not provide a way to comment on them (that's something MI is working on for us). My blog on wine is the only one that is a blog in the true spirit of the genre. We also have a video podcast, which I loosely count as a blog.
Total blog/online column traffic for us is around 7k PVs per week.
We also have three online forums, where registered users can converse (read: yell) about a variety of topics. Not surprising, politics and sports are quite popular. Traffic for these forums averages 45k PVs per week.
Our site sees about 400k PVs per week, so traffic from blogs/online columns/forums is not insignificant for us.
One experiment that is working quite well is our community forum that is linked by name and content with our Saturday editorial page. The best posts go in print, and the topics raised by our editorial page staff are in print and online, with polls, forums, etc. We created a forum for each local political race this fall, and traffic was heavy as a result. Now a lot of the folks who came on because of the political races are involving themselves in other topics, so they are sticking around even though many of the races were decided in the primary.
What we need still are ways to add commenting to all of our stories. I am told MI has some folks working on a way to make the bridge between our Web sites and Drupal more seamless. This will make us much more interactive and invisible with our readers.
If you have not checked out The News Tribune's Seahawks Insider blog, it is getting huge numbers and is worth emulating.
Some N&O blogs get high readership but only a few comments, among them our ACCNow Sports blog, where people seem to come for news. blogs.newsobserver.com/accnow
ReplyDeleteOne of the most comment-rich is our local schools blog, which has become the gathering place for community debate over a major school reassignment plan, a huge proposed bond issue, conversion of many schools to year-round calendar and so forth. Commenters debate with each other and ask the reporter for information. blogs.newsobserver.com/wakeed.